do Bag Ladies become Bag Ladies
before they ever leave their sticky golden syrupy kitchens?
Even while the kids are still yeasty and damper-sweet
and all day thumping up and down on peppermint-gum floorboards
like dobs of burnt butter on a griddle,
do those ladies put on shabby woollen coats with stinky ‘roo collars
and wander sludgy paddocks as though they portend
the light-smeared slick of chip-grease-glossy streets
far away?
Even while those talc-fragrant kids and sawdust-clean tartan hubbies
watch the round-cornered telly in dry-as-dirt papered loungerooms,
do Bag Ladies hunch in sodden khaki tents
and listen to silt-brown creeks beyond flattened paddocks
gurgling like gutters after a 6 o’clock swill?
Do they write damp grey letters by the fumy light of kerosene lanterns
and feel the comforting jute of untidy hair unsplicing and
mouldering around their clammy foreheads?…Such Bag Lady hair!
threaded with tainted metal like old telegraph wires
cut from their sheaths.
While the soft grub-faced kids and the moony-eyed husbands
share neat sweet rows of milk chocolate,
do the Bag Ladies sit in the gloom,
the blowsy gloom-
their work-boots scuffed at the toes and bagged at the sides
and their hands cracked at the edges like the
bloody great cracked paws of spud-farmers-
listening for mumbling gummy strangers on quiet treacle-streaked horses
shuffling along the road,
as quiet as eaten-out wattle-galls plopping,
or boof-headed square-chested dogs killing far away.
Are Bag Ladies always Bag Ladies, do you think?
or are they ordinary invisible mothers who somehow get left outside
in the night?
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